Like a kid (yet again.)

May 30, Columbia (Missouri.)

My head is exploding.
Yesterday I got fitted with a new pair of hearing aids, and it feels just like when I first got hearing aids twenty years ago: a world of sounds is assaulting me with its vigor, a lost world revealed.
What a world!
Simple things, just water flowing, keys jangling, a plastic bag being ruffled, sounds are exploding in my ears, crisp, sharp as nails, and this morning I walk through the house in amazement over the incredible power of the hardwood floors squeaking or the birds chirping outside my windows.
The joy! I am like a newborn discovering the world, in awe and wonder, thanks to failing ten-year-old hearing aids I finally decided to replace.
We threw a sleepover party last night to celebrate the end of the school year, eight boys telling jokes over pizza and then wandering through the house wielding light sabers while eating cup cakes, and four of them are still sleeping in my boys’ bedroom and there I am, of all days, making all that noise today, all that noise but wait, it’s always been there, hidden in the depths of my damaged ears and aging hearing aids, and this explosion of sound sensations is only my renaissance (yet again.)
Just a few days ago I was reading about the world of touch in The New Yorker and I was blown away by the breadth of this world I had never envisioned quite in this way (the power of great reporting and writing,) and reflecting on what our senses mean for each of us individually.
What has losing my ability to hear meant for me over all these years, other than the denial then the reckoning, the world of sound so fresh and new twenty years ago as I first got fitted, and again today? What has it meant other than the wonder of that, this feeling of sounds revealed so strong so full so powerful, such a gift?
I realize that my disability is a gift on days like today, but that it may also be one of the key factors in my ability to photograph in the way that I do, the way some blind people can develop a heightened sound perception. Key to my way through the world, it defines me then in many more ways than a limit and a label.
I may never know, but I am intrigued.
That, and jubilant like a kid.

Eternity and a fire.

May 17, Columbia (Missouri.)

It has been a long time without writing. Single motherhood life so busy, the little ailments of our lives, the friendships and the work done.
But on Sunday the kids and I cleared bushes in the backyard to start making a tree house and made a fire. Or I cleared the bramble and they bickered, and the new neighbors’ girls came over and the other neighbor girl too, and Dylan became a typical ten-year-old trying to impress the girls and Nicolas hovered around wanting to be included and sometimes succeeding. Another task, to make a bow and arrow, and they looked for suitable pieces of wood amid the downed bushes, and feathers (no feathers) and flint stones (no flint stones) and we ended up with a lot of sticks.
This is what cutting electronic devices for the kids on week ends turned out to be, busy. The weather was cool and it was sunny and the yard looked beautiful with the gazebo I improvised for the wisteria and the new cherry trees among the five oak seedlings Dylan brought back from school on Arbor Day because some kids didn’t want them and he had to save them. Ibtisam arrived and we lit the fire and dragged a wooden table outside and ate around the fire while the kids soon wandered away back to the neighbor girls.
Ibtisam is a writer and around the fire we talked about creativity, what it is and how one can or cannot live on it but has to because we agreed it is not a choice but a way of being in the world. We talked about writing and about photography. We talked about how the writing tends to wander away from you, how it carries you along and you end up in an entirely different place from where you started because the words have a life of their own.  The act of writing a form of therapy for me, when photography is simply something I have to do because it calls me, it is there to be taken and I simply the vessel, the eye directing the arm directing the fingers directing the camera to take that picture because it is simply calling to be taken, cutting through the bramble of reality to get to the picture I know is there (sometimes not) and needs to be taken, an urge and a necessity stronger than iron, much stronger than my will, much stronger than my emotions.
When I had a job as a newspaper photographer I remember being in awe of the power of photography to take me out of myself; suffering from a migraine I would go into an assignment knowing that the minute I stepped into the work and started taking pictures the physical pain would be gone, and I wouldn’t realize it until I stepped out again and it came back just as instantly as it had vanished, I like a Buddhist monk who has trained for years to control her mind and can ignore the pain by sheer will, only none of it my conscious making.
Photography is so much more than my voice then. It is much more than the stubborn inner wall I am uselessly building against death and time passing, the joy of emotions translated. It is what connects me to the mystery of what I can’t name, my connection to eternity.

New York!

April 3, 2016, Elmwood Park (New Jersey.)

Spring Break and I took the kids to New York.
The excuse was to take Dylan to the Metropolitan Opera after he surprised my by loving every minute of the performance at the Missouri Theater last month, but who needs an excuse?
Central Park in early bloom and almost winter light, the magic, the hustle of tourist hell Times Square where my friend and host Kristine works, the views from the Empire State Building, the Staten Island ferry ride, the musicians on the subway platforms, the illegal performers in the subway cars, pretzels with mustard and too much salt on the way to the Met, sitting in the Metropolitan Opera house, smelling the smells of New York and going back in time, watching the boys in all their wonder, and their kindness (walking by a guy asking for “money for food,” they said we should help him so we turned around and stood in line and in the rush to get him a sandwich and a hot drink.)
Life is beautiful hardly sums it up. I try to grab a memory or two with my phone, I want more than anything to be in this moment and be elated and grateful.

Does it matter?

March 21, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

Last week I had a routine outpatient procedure at the hospital and it made me think of death. Of course.
What if I didn’t wake up? Things happen after all. And things did not happen, of course, and I woke up fine and was up and going and wondering what to do with the rest of the day, which I had set aside in case, well, something happened, or I felt the way I was told I would feel, woozy, tired, which I didn’t, and I couldn’t even make myself feel productive and clean the car because I had done that the day before, waiting for the effects of the medicine to take hold, nor could I reschedule my tutoring appointments, too late, so I just paid bills and straightened paperwork and cooked, because another effect of the procedure is that I had not eaten since two days before.
Death was out, spaghetti was in.
And so that’s my life.
Frantic and somewhat predictable: and not even a photograph, in those last two weeks, although I have been, as I always am, looking at a lot of photographs, and constantly thinking about them, and why we are taking them and what they mean and what it means and if it matters in the end. Are all photographs  good, no matter, all the million pictures people take, with their cell phones, the million selfies, are they good pictures just because they exist, as someone on social media old me, rebelling against applying any “hierarchy” on art? Does it matter? Why?

A piece of myself is gone.

February 28, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

A woman I loved died this morning in my hometown, in the South of France.
Fanette was one of my closest friends' mother. We grew up together, Zaza, her sister and I, our parents close friends, our childhoods a common territory, Fanette a constant presence.
The afternoons spent in the cavernous stone house deep in our old medieval village, two little girls playing in the stone shed full of magic off the patio, later watching dubbed American TV series in the cluttered room under the roof where Fanette sometimes accompanied us, later still, adolescents, listening to punk rock on the radio in Zaza’s room, her sister Sophie not quite as close but still. Fanette, towering in the art supplies store she owned a few blocks from their home, the smell of paint and pastels, her tall, bony, straight figure commanding and slightly frightening.
It is as if I had grown up in that family as much as in my own’s, Fanette’s taste for traditional French cooking the kind my mother never cooked, her brisk manner, the reassurance of her total authority, Fanette and Jacques, always uttered in that order by my mother and father, their friends Fanette et Jacques, these words mapping my childhood as much as the rooms of my home and roads of my village, the old dark stone village house full of paintings, sculptures and artifacts that secretly scared me, the family were avid collectors and art lovers, the cavernous house and its smells, the smell of polished wood, of stone, of the magical territory of my child mind, that house the realm of my childhood, Fanette, its implacable captain.
She died this morning, at home, surrounded by her family, peacefully my mother told me.
My friend lost her mother, and I a piece of myself too.

Silent partner.

February 14, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

Nicolas has been struggling with attention at school all this week, and with frustration at home, the old sibling rivalries, frustration and anger turned into screeching cries, triggered by nothing. 
For me this means a lot of thinking and agonizing about how to teach my kids the emotional and social skills they need to develop into emotionally and socially stable, fulfilled and happy adults, it means a lot of thinking back into my own childhood and how my own insecurities developed, and stayed, and whether I can successfully teach those so important skills to my kids when I’m so unsure about mastering them myself. It means a lot of time spent parenting, and less for photography.
Being a single mother means the responsibility for all this, and everything else, rests on me, and just me. Sometimes the pressure feels just overwhelming. But there is the grace, the daily drop of happiness, and gratitude, the grace and the rain and looking up at the grey skies, swirling in the cries.
Grace: my children. They were planned; they have been my priority since I brought them into this world; they come first.
This means sometimes, most of the time, my days are filled with them, and work, and photography goes under the surface, although it is always there, like a friend walking by my side, my silent partner.

January breeze.

February 7, 2016, Columbia (Missouri.)

We camped out in the total rehab of a house on an air mattress that made my back screech, amidst the rubble and the dirt, with the tall windows open because it smelled of paint, and there was happiness.
The weather warm enough for spring, I opened the windows to let the breeze in, late January and it’s like sneaking out of winter for a night, and breathed in happiness, all together again, so uncomfortable and so perfectly joyful, silly, and in the morning, when I was scrubbing on, there was a work of art: right there the windows in the kids room, neatly covered in newspaper because of painting the walls, and the light through the print, an ephemeral work of art, beauty.
What makes a life worth living?
Streams of simple happiness in the unexpected, two boys, raising them to be caring, and love, or maybe just the light through the window, and the caress of an impossible January breeze.